About Sharper Image

Sharper Image is an e-commerce company offering consumers an engaging way to find the latest home electronics, air purifiers, and other lifestyle products.

Tame the Google Shopping Beast

Google Shopping Ads have quickly become a retailer marketers’ favorite ad product, with good reason. The visual nature of these ads has proven effective at turning searchers into buyers. Behind the scenes, however, management of Shopping campaigns is more complex than its predecessor, the simple text ad.

With Shopping Ads accounting for over 50% of retail ad queries, it’s quickly becoming imperative for marketers to master this new skill set. After its 2015 holiday season, Sharper Image decided it needed a technology partner to help it master the complexities of Google Shopping from an analytics, automation, and bidding perspective in order to accomplish its goal of improving profits in the 2016 season.

“SKU Me The Money!”

Sharper Image began working with Marin Software in the spring of 2016 with the goal of improving profits beyond what it achieved in 2015. Marin Software’s account management team advised Sharper Image to leverage the full suite of retail features available, and shared some best practices to help in that effort. Changes were made, Marin automation and bidding enabled, and it yielded a 110% increase in Sharper Image profits in 2016 compared to 2015.

The practitioners at Sharper Image attributed this improvement to two major changes that Marin Software enabled in their marketing program, both revolving around SKU-level optimization—SKU-level bidding and SKU-level reporting and automation. Let’s explore each in more detail.

“Marin allows us to bid down to the SKU level, giving every single product in our catalog the appropriate bid to meet its ROI goal. The amount of control and flexibility that we have with Marin allows us to treat each SKU like a keyword—whereas other bidding platforms take a “blended average” approach and give a large groups of SKUs one bid—we were able to increase profit 110% with Marin Bidding applied to our Shopping Campaigns this holiday season.”

– Kirk Ciarrocchi / Search Marketing Manager, Sharper Image

SKU Analytics and Automation

The key to a high-performing Shopping campaign is to take action on SKUs based on both positive signals (high ROAS) and negative signals (low ROAS). Without automation, this can be a tedious, error-prone procedure. Sharper Image relied on Marin Software’s campaign automation to automatically alert and optimize product groups according to their specified criteria.

“Marin’s automated reporting creates easy and efficient workflows, down to the SKU level. With automated SKU level reports, whenever an individual SKU meets a volume threshold, an alert is triggered … to break the SKUs out into their own ad groups or product groups. This allows us to automate a large portion of our optimization process and save valuable time. Most importantly, it gives us immediate performance feedback.”